Western Short StoryThe Ghosts of Soldier's CreekTom Sheehan

Western Short Story

A soft, steady
breeze, with no puff to it, lifted over the edge of Soldier’s Creek
and carried with it the sooty odor of a dead fire, a dank, drifting
smell that came like the death of an animal a man has long known,
perhaps a favorite horse, like a black stallion unseen at night but a
dark star in the sunlight. Another person might say the odor was of
an old market in a corner of town or an old home left to rot in the
wake of a hundred battles that raged around it, the inhabitants, a
man and his whole family, gone to dust in one of those fierce
battles, so that their essence alone remained of them. One could
almost see the house as it stood decorated with gardens, pet animals,
and lusty children bouncing with life. Yet the odor, despite various
images passersby would have, remained the cold, dank ashes of a fire
long gone into night’s realm, thus it came back each and every
nightfall thereafter.

The posse, halted
on the bank of Soldier’s Creek and about to put down for the night
after a long and fruitless chase, was headed by the oldest sheriff in
the territory, Clayton Chalmers, former cavalry sergeant in the Great
War. Chalmers had been here before, at Soldier’s Creek in the
Arizona Territory. This was where he had seen the ghosts before. And
he knew he’d see them again. They would not let him go. He could
not hide from them.

And Chalmers
carried about with him the constant realization that he’d never get
rid of the ghosts until he joined them, until he was back in the
ranks once more, where he belonged. “A trooper is a trooper, and a
cavalryman is a cavalryman, and that’s forever,” he’d once
heard Major General George Meade say just before the battle of
Gettysburg. That was back on May 1, 1863, but the words hung on like
an orator’s legacy. Chalmers felt them every time he climbed into
his saddle, every time he thought of Culp’s Hill and other sites
he’d ranged with his horse in the midst of carnage and interminable
death.

Now, on this day,
his posse was hunting for two killers who had escaped from an iron
prison transfer wagon on the way to the penitentiary at Yuma, killing
the driver and two escort riders at a rest stop. The escapees shot
the wagon horses and rode off on the two escorts’ horses, taking
all weapons, ammunition, canteens, and a small amount of travel food.

One posse member,
Chuck Twohig, set about to make a night fire when the odor of old,
wet ashes assailed him on the gentle breeze. He yelled to Sheriff
Chalmers standing a ways off at the edge of the creek, “Hey,
Sheriff, can you smell that old fire, like it’s out there in the
middle of the creek and getting whipped up again after it’s been
doused out?” Twohig did not say that he had seen a soldier walking
toward him, on the water, and who suddenly disappeared. He thought
better of looking foolish in front of one of the most respected
sheriffs in the west, though Chalmers’ association with Soldier’s
Creek was well-known in the territory.

Nor did Chalmers
say that he had also seen the ghost soldier, once a friend, once a
comrade, looking as he had before death came to him, a private in the
ranks. Chalmers wondered if that old friend had been one of the two
night guards of the fateful patrol, for he once liked his whiskey
hard and often at the end of every hard ride or campaign. More than
once that man’s voice had come to him in the night, as he rode
alone out on the grass or on a mountain trail, “Why didn’t you
duck that drunk’s bullet, Clay? You could have been with us, right
here with us.” Over the rim of his canteen cup he had looked as he
offered that marked invitation.

Instead of not
contributing on the spot more mystery to Soldier’s Creek, Chalmers
tendered a warning, “Don’t you worry about that smell, Chuck,
because it’s not going away. It’s been smelling the place up
since the raid near here when the troop was camped out.”

He’d continue to
try to bring it more into the open. He added as if he was a narrator,
“The Apaches, it’s said, left out two bottles of whiskey the
night guards found and drank off. They fell asleep on their rounds
and the Apaches walked in and killed every man in the troop after
they had doused the campfire with water and moved in the darkness
like a cougar or a puma on the kill. It was retaliation for the
massacre of Apaches in Pinals in June of 1870. Lots of Apache women
and children killed in that merciless raid. A terrible thing, a stain
on the army forever and on those who ordered it done. I’ve smelt
the ashes from that fire for at least half a dozen years. It’s
there, ripe as melons in the garden, every time I come by.”

“What happened to
them guards, Sheriff?” Twohig said. The ghost had retreated, and
he preferred not to mention such a ludicrous vision.

“Oh, they were
the first ones to get their throats cut and then they were scalped.”
Chalmers spoke in a distant tone, as if his words were being
measured, a fine being levied, a judgment passed.

“Then the Apaches
got everybody else?” Twohig was intrigued by the sheriff’s tone,
and aware that he was himself smack in the middle of something he had
seen and could not believe. If it was happening to the sheriff,
again, for everybody knew his history, it was not going to happen to
him.

“Yup, sure as
you’re sitting there ready to light that new fire, Chuck, they got
the whole company.” It was not as if he had said, “They got all
of them but me.” He had not brought that fully loaded into his mind
as yet.

“You got a real
nice way of upsetting someone, Sheriff. Might play hell with a
night’s sleep … if we’re still here come morning, full
morning.” Twohig looked out across the creek, checking if the
mysterious soldier had reappeared. He saw nothing.

“It sure did that
to the troop,” Chalmers said, as he rolled over on his blanket,
thinking back to the night he fell off his horse, a stray bullet in
his shoulder from a drunken cowboy celebrating the end of a long
drive. He never made the patrol to Soldier’s Creek with his
company. But he remembered the name of the drunk who was
wild-shooting after a night on the town: Victor Rangely, dead of
hanging in the territory two years earlier than this night, his body
hanging for three days or so on the stout limb of a tree outside
Williamsville, the vultures venturing to his eyes, his tongue, his
extremities. Two army scouts buried him, taking his weapons and a
private paper of a sort off his person before covering him up. It was
the piece of paper that identified him, and Chalmers had no feeling
when he heard of the man’s death by hanging. “Things happen,”
he said to himself, “when you least expect them and they may not be
your fault.”

He had fought the
sense of guilt for years, and again this night it rolled over him in
waves, the way grass bends in a strong wind, ever rolling, ever
bending to another will, another power.

Memory, he
reflected, has its good parts and its bad parts. It was still fact
that he’d stiffen straight up with pride and nostalgia at the first
note of special bugle calls. Reveille and Call to Colors and Last
Call snuck down inside him each time and burst within, carrying a
host of images that held on with a kind of desperation, as if he had
not chosen the right path in life, as if a power bigger than him was
measuring distance, time, achievement. It was as much haunt as it was
memory.

Rangely, dead or
alive, was a bad part of his memory, and here again, on the edge of
Soldier’s Creek, the whole fiasco called again in a new haunting.
The odor of the ashes lingered all the hours of the night and offered
up a final taste when they departed in the morning.

In that long ago a
young recruit had come to his bunk where he was recovering, saying he
had orders to bring him to the troop commander. “Sarge, you better
come quick. The Captain’s real nervous. I think something bad’s
happened to the company. I thought he was going to pull my arm out of
its socket, he’s so upset. Better hurry, Sarge, ‘cause I don’t
know what’s bothering him so much.”

“You’re a lucky
man, Sergeant,” the captain told Chalmers. “The only man left
alive in your company, so I am transferring you to another company in
another post. I am afraid that his incident will never leave you and
I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes. That night you were shot, you
could have spun the other way. It’s hard to say, ’But better safe
alive than dead with comrades.’ The weight promises to be fearsome.
I do not envy you.”

Only for one year
did he last in the new situation, then got his discharge and turned
to law where he established a reputation for fairness, perseverance
and behavior that bordered on the most dangerous, as though he placed
little value on his own life. People of all walks knew it was a
consequence of his being the only “survivor” of his company, long
since dubbed “The Lost Company B,” the original one. That, of
course, is hard to carry about in one person’s saddlebag.

And here on this
ghostly night he found himself once more at the site of one of the
two most ignominious losses in western military annals. Custer, being
present at Bull Run, and Chalmers not being present when Company B
was massacred to the man, and thereby thrusting each incident into a
sad story of its own, each with its own touch of irony: Custer could
not carry his own story about, but Chalmers could, a man of the law
caught up in fate as twisted as it can get.

Unable to sleep
well the whole night, Chalmers shrugged his shoulders in the pre-dawn
flush of life and caught the acrid smoke of the old, dead fire. It
was a statement about the dangers of not being alert in the ranks at
all times. He rolled over in his blanket to listen to the sounds that
came on the early air. An owl thumped its wings as it set about
catching a meal. A tethered horse’s nicker seemed an answer to a
distant wolf’s cry for mate or dominion. A tin coffee pot touched a
stone as the coffee started its own aroma run into day.

He thought it best
not to forget what was about him, this second life he’d been given,
a life saved at the hands of a drunk. Fate has its own ways, he
believed, and there’s never any arguing with the manner or method
of fate’s choices, though cry you might, or go sleepless amid the
dark and portentous images that never let go.

Suddenly, one of
the night guards cried out, “Hey, Sheriff, there’s one a them
killers walking in here with no weapon. His hands are raised over his
head, but I don’t trust him one bit.” There was a pause in the
dramatic announcement, and then the guard said, “You want me to
shoot him, Sheriff? I’d do it in a second.”

Chalmers heard the
killer screaming about ghosts, and he yelled out, “Don’t shoot
him. Don’t shoot him. I have to talk to him. Don’t shoot him.”

He was out of his
blanket, gun in hand and facing the killer, who was still blubbering
and acting like he had seen death itself. His eyes, caught in the
light of the fire, glowed red and awful as if he indeed had seen
death on the prowl.

“What is it,
man?” Chalmers said, thrusting his gun into his belt. “What have
you seen?” He stood beside the killer, now reduced to a mere shadow
of a man, and saw how tremors ripped through his body, and how fear
was a loose and live thing on his skin.

“I saw them,
Sheriff, the whole gang of them, down there at the bend of the creek,
yellin’ and screamin’’ at me, sayin’ it was my turn, sayin’
it was somebody else’s turn, too. They’re all in them uniforms of
theirs, that blue and yeller ones, and you can’t touch nary a one
of them ‘cause they won’t let you. They keep siftin’ away like
they was clouds.”

“Who else were
they talking about?” Chalmers said, and Twohig, off to one side,
realized he had seen something out on the creek, and the sheriff
would not laugh at him if he told him. Not like some other posse
members would laugh, carrying the whole story back to town, laughing
all the way.

The escaped killer,
his hands still over his head, still shaking because of what he had
seen, what he had heard on the creek, said, “They was talkin’
about you, Sheriff. Said so right out. Called you Sergeant Chalmers
like it was your name all the time and they was waitin’ for you.”

The escaped killer
didn’t know how much truth he had uttered in his reply to the
sheriff. He only saw what he felt himself, an unknown knowledge come
into his consciousness, come home, like a lost dogie home from the
scrub.

Neither the killer
nor the sheriff, the one-time sergeant of lost Company B, saw the
second escaped killer, never aware of any ghosts but aware of the
posse leader that had hounded him and his pard for such a long time,
kneel beside a log, lay his rifle over a protruding but broken limb,
and take deadly aim at the sheriff.

He squeezed off the
fateful shot that was a long time on its way. Behind him, at a bend
of Soldier’s Creek, lost Company B scattered and disappeared
forever, all the ranks accounted for, the muster complete.